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FRONT GROUP FINANCIAL INFORMATION: DBSA

This research was conducted by Evelyn Pringle… I hope you can note the inserted comments from her and look below to read my comments, which I’ll leave off the article portion and put in the comment box.

The 2006 Annual Report for the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance shows that AstraZeneca gave the group more than $500,000 in 2006.Companies that gave between $150,000 and $499,000 included Abbott Laboratories, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. Forest Laboratories, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen, Pfizer, and Shire Pharmaceuticals each gave between $10,000 and $149,000.)

It also publishes the following message which explains where some of the drug money went:

Speaking Out for New Moms

Six years ago, after giving birth to her first child, a successful 41-year-old sales manager plunged to her death from a Chicago hotel’s 12th floor as firefighters pleaded with her. Melanie Blocker-Stokes took her own life, despite medical help and the support of family and friends.

Melanie’s tragedy soon prompted legislation in both the U.S. House and Senate. If passed, the Melanie-Blocker Stokes Postpartum Depression and Research Act and the MOTHER’s Act will help the families and women afflicted by postpartum depression (PPD) through lifesaving educational programs and screening services.

In January, DBSA sent an Advocacy Alert asking you to write your legislators in support of these PPD bills. Thousands of you sent letters to Congress through our Legislative Action Center (LAC). As time went on, instead of contacting individual legislators, you began to ask specific congressional committees (like the House Committee on Energy and Commerce), to support a vote rather than just a bill.

Unfortunately, rumors and lies began circulating on the Web, as outspoken opponents began asking people not to support these bills. While they called themselves “experts,” none of them had any expertise in mental health or any PPD-related field. They claimed the legislation was just a conspiracy by big pharmaceutical companies to push new moms to take unnecessary medication.

Tell that to the more than 800,000 women who will develop a diagnosable postpartum mood disorder this year! To debunk these myths, on April 8, DBSA sent you another alert marked “Urgent.” Your response has been nothing less than amazing-unprecedented, Web experts tell us! Just nine hours after our alert, you’d sent 1,200 letters to legislators.

In the next two days, you sent 6,300 more. After one month, you’d sent over 15,000 letters speaking out against the PPD rumors! And, for the first time, other groups are proactively joining us.

Organizations and blog sites like Postpartum Support International (PSI), Postpartum Progress, Moms Speak Up, Becoming Me, Beyond Blue and EmpowerHer are linking their readers to our LAC so that even more letters reach Congress.

Did you know that as few as five letters can make a difference in how your legislator votes? Even if you’ve already sent a letter supporting PPD legislation, please send another.

Her blog reports “that Susan Stone over at Perinatal Pro is alerting everyone to the new petition created by the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance to support the Melanie Blocker Stokes MOTHERS Act. She states that last year’s petition generated more than 24,000 signatures. The petition has been reintroduced this year to try and get this legislation passed once again.”

The blog carries a live link to an advocacy alert page where “you can scroll down, enter your zip code and generate letters of support in a matter of seconds for the Melanie Blocker Stokes MOTHERS Act that will be sent to your local Congresspeople and Senators.”

Ms Stone further advises: “I just sent my letters. I know you’re thinking “but I already did that last year.” Well that was then and this is now. Do it again.”

An editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association called a university professor “a nobody and a nothing” after he pointed out, correctly, that a JAMA author had failed to disclose a financial relationship with Forest Labs in an article about Lexapro, according to the WSJ.

The spat, although entertaining, will probably be examined carefully by the U.S. Department of Justice, which is currently suing Forest for, among other things, the “placement” of positive news stories in the media about Lexapro.

The author, Dr. Robert Robinson of the University of Iowa, had published a study of the use of Lexapro vs. therapy in patients who had suffered strokes, to see if either helped the patients avoid becoming depressed. The study concluded that both helped, with only 9 percent of Lexapro patients becoming depressed and 12 percent of those on therapy. About 22 percent of those who received a placebo became depressed.

… we were confused by a subtle but seemingly critical omission from the published paper. While the authors compared both Lexapro and therapy to placebo, they did not report on the direct comparison of therapy to Lexapro …

Leo pointed this out in a rival publication, the British Medical Journal. And then the folks at JAMA seem to have gone completely crazy. WSJ:

Leo says he received an angry call from JAMA executive deputy editor Phil Fontanarosa last week, shortly after Leo’s article was published on the BMJ Web site. “He said, ‘Who do you think you are,’ ” says Leo. “He then said, ‘You are banned from JAMA for life. You will be sorry. Your school will be sorry. Your students will be sorry.”

The call from Fontanarosa was followed up by ones from JAMA editor-in-chief Catherine DeAngelis to Leo’s superiors, Leo says. He said she asked his superiors to get him to retract his article in the BMJ.

… “This guy is a nobody and a nothing” she said of Leo. “He is trying to make a name for himself. Please call me about something important.” She added that Leo “should be spending time with his students instead of doing this.”

When asked if she called his superiors and what she said to them, DeAngelis said “it is none of your business.” She added that she did not threaten Leo or anyone at the school.

As Leo notes, however, in addition to not doing a head-to-head comparison between Lexapro and therapy, Robinson also failed note that he had taken money from Forest Labs. Leo:

In a letter to JAMA, we pointed this out. Five months later, our letter was published along with an acknowledgement from the original authors that indeed the difference between therapy and medication was not statistically significant.

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Evelyn Pringle tipped me off to another connection between Postpartum Support International (PSI) and industry-influenced information. If you go to this link on their site, you can see information being forwarded to moms from the Emory Women’s Mental Health Program as well as Massachussetts General Hospital (who also takes money from drug companies while simultaneously promoting The MOTHERS Act and claiming that drugs like Paxil are safe for pregnancy).

Charles Grassley’s investigations into major psychiatric opinion leaders have consistently demonstrated undisclosed financial conflicts of interest. The latest investigation led to Dr. Nemeroff’s voluntary surrender of his post at Emory as the head of the Psychiatry Department. Grassley found Nereroff made millions of dollars off SRRI makers and only disclosed a small fraction of the amount.

Sertraline in the Treatment of Women with Postpartum Onset Major Depression
Stowe Z.N., Casarella J., Landry J.C., and Nemeroff C.B. (1995) “Sertraline in the Treatment of Women with Postpartum Onset Major Depression”. Depression. 3:49-55.

Women at Risk for Postpartum Depression
Stowe Z.N., and Nemeroff C.B. (1995) “Women at Risk for Postpartum Depression”. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. 173:639-645.

The Use of Lithium and Management of Women with Bipolar Disorder During Pregnancy and Lactation
Llewellyn A., Stowe Z.N., and Nemeroff C.B. (1998) “The Use of Lithium and Management of Women with Bipolar Disorder During Pregnancy and Lactation”. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. 59 [suppl 6]:57-64.

Acute Effects of Alprazolam and Adinazolam on the Concentrations of Corticotropin-Releasing Factor in the Rat Brain
Owens MJ, Bissette G and Nemeroff CB. (1989) “Acute effects of alprazolam and adinazolam on the concentrations of corticotropin-releasing factor in the rat brain”. Synapse 4:196-202.

The Effects of Acute Antipsychotic Drug Administration on the Neurotensin System of the Developing Rat Brain
Kinkead B, Owens MJ and Nemeroff CB. (2000) “The effects of acute antipsychotic drug administration on the neurotensin system of the developing rat brain”. Brain Research Dev Brain Res 124:1-10.

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According to research from the Pioneer Press website – where pharma payments to physicians are being documented in a database (2002 on…):

The OBGYN who prescribed me Zoloft and gave me samples of 50 mg tabs after having REMOVED the warning label…

Accepted $967 from pharmaceutical companies before his retirement in 2005. In 2004, he took $766 from pharma, and in 2005, $200.

2004 was the year he prescribed me Zoloft following a brief approximately one-minute-long conversation.

This is how little I mattered to him. Not enough time to talk to me – but enough time to bother to hand me drugs that could kill me and my baby. But he had enough time to do ‘education’ and attend dinners with pharma sponsors, and to fill out the reimbursement form for his $100 dinner or whatever the procedure is to get money from pharma.

Since he retired in 2005 (or 2006?) after coming down with an indiagnosable mystery disease… that’s where the Pioneer Press records end.

Now let’s have a look at the shocking record of payments to my second doctor – the shrink who was responsible for keeping me locked away from Isaac even though I was told that I could go home if I changed my mind about the admission – the man who lied and told me that Zoloft does not take effect fast enough to have been the culprit when I started questioning it – the man who told me he was forcing me to stay in the hospital against my will and there was nothing I could do about it, and that I could not go home until I became compliant with “my meds.”

From 2002-2005 he took $11,590 from pharmaceutical companies. Many of these payments were for “honoraria” and “research projects.” So, Dr. G… how did the research turn out? How many dead women and babies did your research produce?